The first Release Pack of ROSA Marathon 2012 has been made available for public download. ROSA Marathon is the enterprise desktop edition of ROSA Linux, a Linux distribution derived from Mandriva Linux and developed by ROSA Laboratory, a Linux solutions provider based in Moscow, Russia.

Desktop environments supported by ROSA Linux are the K Desktop Environment (KDE), GNOME 2, and LXDE. The main edition, which received this release pack, uses KDE. Aside from an updated Kernel (from kernel 3.0.28 to 3.0.38) the main highlight of this release pack is the addition of tooltips to SimpleWelcome, the distribution’s menu application.

This screen shot shows SimpleWelcome on an installation of ROSA Marathon 2012 before applying the Release Pack 1 updates. Notice that with the mouse cursor over the LibreOffice Impressive icon, there is no tooltip, which means that launching an application is the only means of finding out what it does, assuming you did not have prior knowledge of the application, or cannot guess what it is used for from its name.

Now, take a look at this screen shot. Notice the tooltip. That is a welcome feature, and that is how it should be.

Other updates that came with the release pack are:

KDE updated to version 4.8.3, and the removable media automount issue fixed

The wrong file permissions issue of a user avatar file in fresh install was fixed, the KDE Control Center freezing problem while editing personal data was fixed also

Added PDF and ODT support for KLook and drag-and-drop support for StackFolder. Note that these features were released way back in June

The weird Dolphin behavior of creating Trash folder while deleting files from USB stick was fixed